2024oct15: there was a period of time where this seemed like one of the most important concepts I’d ever heard of, but I haven’t even really thought about it much recently. It feels like when I first learned about complex systems. I nerded out about it bigly, and then subsequently just internalized it into everything I was doing and didn’t find it necessary to point at it directly. Still, I expect I’ll find some reason to revisit this at some point.

2023dec thoughts: this seems destined to be intertwined in an essay about deviants and greatness.

I don’t believe that status is a zero sum game, not in a way that matters. (thread)

I also don’t believe that status intrinsically makes people happy. There are lots of high-status people who are absolutely miserable.

You have to earn your own respect first. If you don’t respect yourself, the admiration of others feels hollow & fake, and the more people express adulation, the more miserable you feel. You can see this in some celebrities, especially those who are trapped performing an act that they despise. They start to feel like a circus animal.

It’s also possible to be happy and not have much status, I’ve met lovely people like this and there is a glow about them.

When I was about 22 or so I had a bunch of “status” as a “renowned blogger”. But I did not respect myself and I did not respect my work. So I walked away from it. It was painful, alienating, isolating. I felt hollow and cold and alone.

I worked really hard for several years to try and build new meaning for myself. It was a really tedious & painful process and it felt like I was working against myself in all directions. In retrospect I realise this is probably too difficult for most people to do alone like I did.

If you think you’re miserable because you lack status, I bet you’d still be miserable if you were bestowed status (look up what happens to lottery winners).

The thing you should probably be seeking, (in my opinion, based on 100s of conversations) is not status but self-respect.

You could say that self-respect is just the status you give yourself. I can tell that you don’t respect yourself if you waste your time and energy dunking on internet strangers.

Self-loathing is an interesting inverted/shadow form of self-respect. the part that is loathed is scapegoated, but the part doing the loathing is venerated as an authority. This authority is illegitimate yet accepted. One can become a cruel authoritarian dictator over oneself.

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Status regulation:

“Trying to do interesting things in the future is a status violation because your current status right now determines what kinds of images you are allowed to associate with yourself […] “Publicly setting out to do valuable and important things eventually is above the status you already have now, and will generate an immediate system-1 slapdown reaction.” – Status Regulation and Anxious Underconfidence, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Nov 2017

There’s something akin to an existential crisis when you really see the truth of status regulation. In fact, I think realizing that you’re gonna die one day can be, in some respects, less harrowing than realising that some of the people you consider friends & loved ones are suppressing you because of their own traumas, anxieties, insecurities.

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Something that is cringe in one status economy can be extremely based in another status economy.

Part of the big shakeup of the world since smartphones, twitter, whatsapp, youtube, etc is the ability for people in one status economy to directly observe the people in another, and to dunk on them for ingroup points, which kinda creates a Neo-Hobbesean “war of all against all”.

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One of my oddball beliefs that I haven’t been able to articulate on main is that, in a way, receiving weird-ass messages like this, probably from some dude having some kind of mental episode, increases my status in a physical, embodied way that cannot be faked.

One way to think about it is “hot girl energy”. Hot girl energy isn’t just about being physically attractive. It’s also about skilfully, casually fending off weirdos who want your time/attention. This state itself is hard to fake, there’s a proof-of-work that goes into it.

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A king must learn to be unfazed. A thing that will happen as you accumulate status amongst some people is that some people outside of that domain will mock and insult you for it. It will be tempting to get defensive, but for the most part, the best move is actually to calmly disregard it. Demonstrating calm, being unfazed in the face of haters, hecklers, minstrels mocking you, is how you further demonstrate the depth of your kingliness. This in turn will persuade more people that you’re the real deal.

All crowns are theatre props. And in a sense you could say that the hecklers are there to help you demonstrate your values.

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have a few riffs about this at this point but again I’m thinking that a bit part of status is a sort of physical non-flinching when people project shit at you that has nothing to do with you. eg if you’re a hot girl & guys fling themselves at you and you have to stay cool to deal

interestingly this also very directly means that having haters can very directly elevate someone’s physical, embodied status, if they choose to receive the energy that way

receiving a lot of other people’s energy is an intrinsically dangerous game, like lifting a lot of weight or driving at high speeds

part of why some celebrities come across as infantile is because they literally sort of opt-out of receiving the energy and use very big/broad filters

another alternative is to go fucking mad, which is also a thing you can see

rewatching Obama and Seinfeld with this perspective is interesting, these guys are champion weightlifters and F1 drivers just for being able to think clearly at all

a thing that’s kind of confusing to navigate is that you will be exposed to people who talk to you (at you, really) with a sense of entitlement, and the challenge is to not overcorrect and become entirely cold and aloof to everyone. in a way that’s what king energy is

you *literally* have to “be the bigger person” in the sense that you have to have the larger frame that accommodates both the other person’s frame and your own

and you cannot be stiff and inflexible about it. that’s overcorrection, you look like you’re protesting too much, or think too highly of yourself, etc etc. a genuine sense of humor is very very very important. (see: Dune quote “greatness is a transitory experience”)

gretchen from mean girls was a good eg of someone who didn’t have an understanding of where her status came from (proximity to regina) and got pwned for it. (“I’m sorry that people are so jealous of me… but I can’t help it that I’m popular”)